When Tomer, Edward, and I founded Gusto (formerly ZenPayroll) in 2011, one of our inspirations was seeing how transactional the existing “back-office” systems were. There are terms like “human capital management” and “Human Resources”. People are NOT capital. They are not resources, and they are not just ID numbers. They are human beings and they deserve to be treated as such. The idea that people are the foundation of every business wasn’t a debate we had. It made sense to us and we started building Gusto in order to bring that philosophy to an industry that is more focused on Automated Data Processing.

We’ve made a tremendous amount of progress over the past few years, but we have much more work to do. This includes adding to the service we offer today, but also engaging in these discussions around the meaning of work, and how people can find purpose and fulfillment in how they spend a huge part of their day.

These topics are at the very core of how a capitalist society operates where work, jobs, companies, compensation, currency, are key building blocks.

We don’t agree with how this industry functions today. We don’t believe it puts the employer or the employee first, and we’re working hard to change it.